Watt time is left
tedunangst.com
tedunangst.com
I imagine the argument about this, is that most people don't have any handle on what a Watt or mAh is. But people don't have a good handle on how far 25 miles is, or how much a gallon is in comparison to their tank. Think about it, you rarely see the fuel you put into your car beyond a few drips at the pump. And while you may know that its 25 miles between your house in work, if I took a random point on a map and said find something 25 miles away, with no scale, most people couldn't do it. Gallons and MPG are just arbitrary numbers that consumers have learned how to compare. If you exposed those numbers, they would get a better handling on what their device consumes, and how their activities affect it.
Using your analogy, your gas gauge doesn't show the number of gallons, it shows a relative level.
Even my model year 2000 clunker has instant MPG, average MPG, miles to empty and a gas gauge with actual gallons.
Such a style is cheaper to implement. Resistive float sensor in the tank, run a wire to a mini 90 degree needle gauge in the instrument cluster, done. Instant/Average MPG and miles to empty are additional fanciness that up until recently, came standard only on higher-end cars, or was part of an optional package that may or may not be avail on lower end brands/models.
Everything else (1998 Toyota Camry, 2002 Chevy Impala, 1997 Ford Ranger, 2005 VW GTI) have only had an analog fuel gauge.
If you always drive your car in the same manner then sure, you'll probably have a reasonable estimate. But similarly if all you do with your computer is browse the web, you'll also have a predictable battery remaining estimate. But while many people do drive fairly consistently, your usage of your computer probably has a lot more variety in terms of energy impact.
I don't know anyone who actually adjusts their driving to try to push the mpg metric up. I'm sure there is some tiny subset of the population that does this but in general this isn't actually a useful number except to make people annoyed that they aren't getting the EPA estimated fuel efficiency.
Car manufacturers don't provide this because it's actually useful. They provide it because it's easy and people like bells and whistles.
> if I took a random point on a map and said find something 25 miles away, with no scale, most people couldn't do it.
I don't think this is a particularly meaningful observation since maps have scales precisely because it's basically impossible to know the distance between two points without a scale. This isn't a function of not intuitively grasping what a mile it. It's a function of maps being scaled. Even if you have an amazing grasp on distances it won't directly translate to the map.
I'm not a hardcore hypermiler, but just doing little tricks (minimizing throttle/braking, "reading" traffic, maintaining an appropriate speed/distance relative to other cars, etc) makes quite a bit of difference in the commute. I have a small (tiny?) turbocharged car and can get 40-42 mpg on my commute between Denver and Boulder.
In the same sense, I'd like to know how my computer usage is affecting my battery life. Do the extra tabs I have open in chrome matter, or should I bookmark them and close them until I need them? Just because I value one thing over another, doesn't mean the less valued option doesn't come in to play when making a decision.
It doesn't really matter because your gas mileage is likely dominated by things like flooring it down on-ramps.
But 3rd is more efficient in the case you describe.
Those effects are noticeable on my normal commute, where I travel 8 miles and spend most of the time going less than 30 mph, where aerodynamics doesn't matter that much. When I take a road trip (and thus don't have to perform any suicide merges), the difference any of these things makes is quite substantial. My summer tires are each about an inch wider than the tires I have mounted on my old rims, and switching to the narrower tires makes more of a difference in mileage than taking off the roof rack. With the narrow tires and no roof rack, I can get about 36 miles per gallon at 55 mph, and with my winter tires and my roof rack on my car I can't even approach 30 MPG.
For a tech-related example: I prefer to use my phone with the backlight turned all the way up, even though it uses an additional 15% of every full charge, but I uninstalled the Facebook app because it used 3% of every battery just running in the background.
I'm just trying to be efficient in my own way, I'm not competing on efficiency.
A huge part of why my mileage is terrible is because I basically have the worst possible commute for fuel mileage. live in Chicago, which supposedly has the worst traffic congestion in the country. My commute is only about 8-10 miles, but there is a lot of variation in speed. I can go from stopped to 65-75 miles an hour back down to stopped several times on my commute. The commute takes about 30 minutes, and I spend a lot of time idling.
Obviously that is a ridiculously low mileage for a car, even given the conditions. My fuel mileage never dips below 18 mpg for an entire tank, but it rarely goes above 20 mpg unless I leave the city. Looking at similar vehicles on Fuelly, I don't think it's that far out of the norm.
My Impreza is a 2010 OBS, with the 2.5L NA EJ25, and a 4EAT. I think what really kills my mileage is the 4-speed automatic. From what I've read, it's absolutely brutal on fuel efficiency compared to the 5 speed manual. The NA uses a lot more fuel than the turbo when just puttering along as a result of its higher compression (10.0:1 vs. 8.2:1) It's not necessarily a negative - my car is faster off the line than the turbo, especially after sitting in traffic on a hot day.
I know the WRX has a DOHC engine, whereas the 2.5i is SOHC. That probably makes some difference in efficiency, though I don't know how much.
On top of that, I almost always have my roof rack on if I'm driving in the city, and I usually have a bike rack mounted as well. Plus, I have the hatchback, which I've heard also impacts mileage, though I have no idea if that's true.
I've also replaced the somewhat narrow stock-all seasons with wider and softer tires summer tires. I run high sidewall winter tires on steel rims in the winter, which weigh a lot more than the stock alloys/all seasons.
Regardless, the Impreza really sucks at city mileage compared to other cars because of the added weight and drivetrain losses of the AWD. (As you probably know) It's really no surprise the 2.5i and 4EAT have been replaced by a much smaller engine coupled to a CVT.
The hatchback probably doesn't impact your fuel mileage much. I don't think the difference between DOHC and SOHC is going to have any measurable impact on fuel mileage either. Nor would I assume that a compression ratio change does that much. Your final drive ratio is probably the most significant impact. Additionally how much time you spend in "lockup" mode (where the fluid clutch is essentially disengaged and the engine crankshaft is directly connected to the driveline) is a major contributor. The roof rack absolutely impacts fuel mileage as Consumer Reports demonstrated: http://www.consumerreports.org/cro/news/2013/07/tests-show-b...
Anyways, I take the highway to work, and I take a short stint on a highway and then surface streets on my way home. On my way home I run in to something like 40 stop signs. Pretty much every intersection has a four way stop for a few miles of my commute.
I can actually quantify how much the roof rack affects mileage, because I track whether I have it on my car or not in addition to my mileage.
That just screams "hybrid" to me. Wouldn't a hybrid or EV be the perfect vehicle for that scenario?
The "shift up" recommendations to me seem like an attempt to replicate the ideal conditions under which the official efficiency tests are done - and we all know about /those/ figures...
You don't have to measure for yourself at all. The things you can do to save gas are well understood. If you generally just don't trust others' fuel efficiency guidance, I'm not sure why you'd trust someone else's mpg estimate either.
I get the logical appeal of the immediate feedback MPG meter, but I'm not clear how accurate these things are (vs meters on the gas pump, which are regulated to be within a tight spec). I'm also not clear how useful the MPG right now is vs the MPG over the past hour. I've seen only one car that let me reset the MPG meter and measure for an arbitrary period of time that I control, and I still have no idea how accurate it was. (Yes, I'm sure there is more than one car with this feature. I've only seen it once.)
Again, I just generally don't buy that instant (actually averaged over some amount of time that you don't control, with some accuracy that is likely not guaranteed) MPG estimates are all that useful. Are you dedicated enough to efficiency that you'll drive without A/C in the summer to see if it's better but you somehow don't care enough to bother recording actual gas usage? Who are these people willing to drive without A/C to save a MPG but too lazy to confirm that it really works? Or realistically is this one of those things where you turn off the A/C, glance at the MPG estimate and see it went up from 20 to 22, and assume that you've got a definitive answer despite not knowing anything about the margin of error for the MPG estimate?
On one hand, instantaneous mpg is seriously misleading. To me, accelerating efficiently means maximizing the amount of acceleration I get per unit of fuel—doing that does NOT maximize instantaneous mpg, but ideally finds the optimal point on the fuel-consumption-rate*time graph that you actually care about.
On the other hand, real-time feedback is probably better for the not-exactly-scientifically-rigorous way people learn, and it can be useful for noticing unexpected behavior not covered by intentional experiments.
A realtime unit-less fuel efficiency gauge in a U-Haul clued me into non-ideal behavior from the automatic transmission climbing hills. Feedback from this dumb gauge caused me to adjust my driving, which meant only my first tank of gas lasted way less time than expected.
It's also apparently pretty common for hybrid-car drivers to adjust driving patterns to improve mpg, partly because the car gives rapid feedback - gamification in real life! - but there's probably also some selection bias, as people who buy high-mpg vehicles are more likely to be concerned about fuel efficiency.
I want Activity Monitor to show how much battery each process is using.
Sample output:
~> ~/Workspace/toolbelt/battery
Temperature = 2967
CycleCount = 384
DesignCapacity = 6600
MaxCapacity = 6362
WearRatio = 96%
CurrentCapacity = 5886
ChargeRatio = 92%
Voltage = 12162
Amperage = -1061
InstantAmperage = 64286
InstantTimeToEmpty = 8:34
TimeRemaining = 5:33
AvgTimeToEmpty = 5:33
FullToEmptyTime = 5:59
You can't see a prediction in minutes yet (maybe they'll add one with Apple removing it), but the battery metrics have always been more useful than for me than what's built-in. You can see the discharge rate, current charge, full capacity, and original capacity though.
- Compute discharge rates for one minute segments, like Ted did in this post
- Store the last 10 discharge rates
- Report a time estimate based on the minimum/median/maximum of those 10 rates.
That gives fairly quick feedback after you start doing something expensive, but isolates the effect of short-lived and infrequent bursts.
I'm not sure why Microsoft/Apple haven't done something similar. I've even sold licenses to Surface Pro sales reps that they use to show off the battery life of the Surface to potential enterprise clients.
http://www.theverge.com/2016/12/13/13939278/apple-macos-sier...
And quite annoying that they're "recognizing" this, when it's often quite useful and not at all misleading. I made good use of that display before, and now they've taken it away.
Or was reported to have "failed to live up to expectations", by idiots who merely assumed the estimate and didn't bother to do an actual clock wall check.
Rather they decided to cut the fake precision (X hours YY minutes) and stick to the segmented-battery icon display.
It's like some statistics were saying there's a 45.32% chance of something, just because that's what their simplistic division of the samples gives them, despite the confidence margin being plus/minus 5 percentage points.
Instead, they now tell you it's "between 40% and 50%".
The target audience of the statistics is not "punished because some idiots took 45.32% literally". They are just shown a better value.
I'd argue that more correct is by definition more useful.
Projections about Earth's global warming are undoubtedly less correct but far more useful because they are actionable.
Correctness is not synonymous with usefulness.
Personally I've now disabled Apple's battery menu extra and replaced it with the one from iStat Menus because that still has a time estimate.
It's an $18 utility, but it's very well designed and has a clock menu extra that's similarly more useful than the one Apple gives you (calendar and multiple time zones in the dropdown).
iStat battery screenshot: http://i.imgur.com/bi95Fs9.jpg
b) It's not sold through the App Store anyway
Take your pick.
Also related around that time: Apple pushed an update for AT&T that changed their HSPA indicator from 3G to 4G without any upgrade haven taken place.
Same as any other kind of estimate (yes, even the legendarily-terrible Windows file copy dialog). It's not misleading, you just have to understand what the numbers mean.
No idea why this came up at the same time as the hardware launch. macOS has had various background sync tasks for a while — iCloud sync, Photos, Time Machine, etc. Sierra adds some background services (specifically, "Optimized Storage") that might have a bigger effect.
https://itunes.apple.com/au/app/battery-time-remaining/id551...
It does feel painful to give Apple 30% of $0.99 (US) in this instance.
PS. i especially like the notifications you can set at 100%, 15%, 5% etc battery life. very handy!
http://a3.mzstatic.com/us/r30/Purple20/v4/db/ec/d0/dbecd0c9-...
https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/battery-health-monitor-batte...
Not a single of the word "menu" in the description page, even. And the UI is kinda..all-over-the-place, to be honest.
Didn't do much with it since the SMC keys differ for pretty much every piece of hardware Apple create and there is practically no information so it requires some investigation for each.
Gives nothing. Why it's not shown? rMBP late 2013, macOS 10.12.2.
Also, thanks for using ag. :)
Bummer.
> Also, thanks for using ag. :)
Thank you for making it ;)
Most people will get the advertised 10 hours, and now people won't think they're not because of an inaccurate estimate.
This article is nice to show that you can get the data from the command line (you can still get it elsewhere in macOS too) but the snark at Apple for saying they can't do it when it's in fact a deliberate design choice just makes the author look uninformed & petty.
You can measure this yourself with any lipoly batteries you have at home. It's quite reliable
It should display "remaining charge" then, not absolute hours and minutes.
This is incorrect on both counts. It's based on remaining available energy, which is actually quite hard to calculate.
There are two ways you can estimate the remaining energy in a battery under load, and neither of them are very accurate. You can measure the voltage, the relationship between which and remaining energy depends on a huge number of factors including effective internal resistance (which changes with battery age, temperature, and across batches), particulars of the chosen chemistry, physical profile of the cells, current draw, etc. This is probably what you're talking about when you suggest measuring this "at home". It's not what any decent quality laptops use. It works OK at equilibrium though.
The other approach is dead reckoning. This involves estimating the discharge profile of the battery (which isn't as simple as "how much charge" the battery holds) and then integrating a non-linear function of the measured current draw based on the discharge profile. This works OK, but you need to combine it with occasional voltage-based recalibration to avoid integration error drift. That usually happens during charging.
Either way, not as accurate as you think, and you have to make assumptions about future current draw. If you give me a AA battery, it's literally impossible for me to tell you how much energy you're going to get out of it. It can easily vary by a factor of 20 depending on how you're going to use it.
Once you have a rough estimate of the remaining energy (which, again, is different from remaining charge), you can use that to formulate a percentage. But for human factors reasons, the displayed percentage almost never correspond to the actual remaining safe power. Most products stretch out percentages near 100% and 0% to give an impression of longer battery life and to give the user plenty of warning to find a charger.
If it's not accurate, as you admit, then it doesn't need to be shown with precision it doesn't actually have (X hours YY minutes). The segmented battery icon still shows the same information in a more fuzzy way that fits the accuracy (or lack thereof) better.
At least it misleads you LESS than the time estimate.
No, it's just BS. Apple doesn't want people paying attention to it anymore, so they removed a useful feature just to avoid complaints.
The "Apple no longer knows how" bit is obviously a joke. I agree with petty, but it doesn't make them look misinformed.
That's a terrible argument.
I'm getting rather annoyed at people telling me the estimate was useless anyway. I used it!
Indeed, but I think the argument is more: at best it was a current workload time indicator. I'm still on 10.11 but think I might just make a battery power indicator of my own. Been wanting a better one for a while anyway.
What I want for a battery indicator is more a dual battery indicator/workload indicator. Aka, lets say some process goes nuts for 10 seconds, I'd want some sort of "hey this thing started up over here and is using energy like a fiend" alert. But if I were on power then I'd say only do that after 30 seconds or whatever. That and also keep historic power use and tie that into current use and times and it would seem like you could have some really stupid ML/linear regression to figure out: the user normally runs a compile every 4pm, and its 4pm and he's not on power so that means it'll likely use XMah which means based on the power available he's got about... N minutes of power remaining.
Still seems a stupidly annoying problem to solve with so many variables.
Citation needed.
>Are we supposed to believe that the release of 10.12.2 marks some watershed moment where they suddenly became useless?
No, it just marks the moment when they were removed. They had been useless for some time now with modern power-saving processors.
The estimate is quite useful on my 2013 MacBook Pro, which I'm pretty sure uses a modern power-saving CPU. Correction: it was quite useful. Now it's gone.
Don't worry, there's all kind of aftermarket crap menubar apps to put it back in.
I'm OK with removing it since it was never really accurate for me. The time estimates did give me anxiety from time to time. What's interesting is since removing the battery percentage label from my phone, I have less battery anxiety there and it "seems" to last longer since I'm less concerned about the actual percentage remaining.
I don't do just fine with my iPhone. I have no real idea how long it'll last. I know that if it's nearly full, it'll last "a while" but I can't judge with any accuracy when I'll need to charge it. My approach is to just plug it in at every reasonable opportunity, which ensures it doesn't quit before the end of the day.
I don't fault Apple for that. My iPhone rarely sees a consistent workload, so I don't see how any sort of useful battery estimate could be done there.
But my computer is a different story. I usually do the same thing with it for hours at a time. Under those conditions, the estimate was both accurate and useful.
Because people make cargo cult attachments all the time?
That's probably what I dislike most about losing this UI tidbit, actually. Number of hours to empty is good, but knowing that my energy usage has silently gone through the roof is really handy.
We're both just talking about our personal experiences, of course. But your position requires nobody to have had my experience, whereas my position is compatible with people having had your experience. I fully acknowledge that the estimate was not perfect and wasn't useful for everybody. But it was for me.
There's a really handy Activity Monitor window then, with energy usage details over time.
It's also true. "It was useful to me" doesn't settle the matter of whether it was actually useful or not.
>No matter what you think of that feature, you can't just condescend people because you are not accepting reasonable and logical arguments.
"It was useful for me" is not a logical argument.
A logical argument would start by checking whether the time estimate matched the remaining time under different usage scenarios.
"But my computer is a different story. I usually do the same thing with it for hours at a time. Under those conditions, the estimate was both accurate and useful."
Can we now move past the part where we assume I'm an idiot, and get on with the conversation?
Why, in the world, would this matter, in a world where people do all kinds of different things with their computers?
In what world does it makes sense to keep a display only for people who "usually do the same thing with it for hours at a time"?
I guess Apple thinks nobody uses their computers for work anymore? And you think that's reasonable?
The fluctuation, if it exists at all, has real meaning in how people are managing their system.
It also gives an indication to the health of battery
They could have showed a range, or a smoother average, or a prediction based on previous use.
They could have a graphical interface illustrating what programs are causing the fluctuation. Many ways to improve something that's already perfectly adequate.
A "people are stupid, let's tell them less" approach is one of the ones making software so profoundly terrible and increasingly less useful.
Yes, the data has value to some users: which is why it's still available.
It's completely misleading in the general case however which is why it's gone from the general UI
However, if the number IS NOT accurate, then don't even give the user the option to see it. It's just going to be misleading.
I thought computers were suppose to this sort silly computations for you.
Being a protector of the hypothetically imbecile user is why some software has been rushing full speed to lowest common denominator design.
This toxic culture strives to corral users and remove features.
These are the same projects which seem to be getting slower and buggier with each release. It's making me absolutely abhor the industry I work in and I'm ashamed of such workmanship.
I don't know when it became so fashionable to try to excel at making terrible software.
Time remaining... 364 Time remaining... 327 - 37 Time remaining... 326 - 1 Time remaining... 361 + 35
Ted, i suggest you remove it too, and not mislead your users :D
The only thing apple's change did was remove a useful feature from users and maybe make it harder to notice battery performance regression (not that I'm sure if there was any with the latest macbook).
If Microsoft or some Linux distro did this for user complaint I believe you would have been hard pressed to find anyone defending it. I'm typing this on a Macbook pro and while I think this is the best device for me for a lot of reason there so many idiotic Apple decisions out there that I have seen excused away that I'm frankly tired of it.
So far for me, it has worked every single time that I can remember.